| Tuesday, May 1, 2007 10:49AM | | | | Remembering Ryszard Kapuscinski | Posted By: Jane Ciabattari
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Remembering Ryszard Kapuscinski
Jane Ciabattari
Friends and admirers of Ryszard Kapuscinski, the Polish wire service reporter turned literary genius who died in January, gathered Sunday at the New York Public Library to toast him with a bottle of vodka provided by Philip Gourevich of the Paris Review, all part of PEN's World Voices Festival. (The panel made a point of finishing the bottle, signalling there was not a KGB agent in the lot.)
Photographs of and by Kapuscinski played against the walls, as did scenes from Gabrielle Pfeiffer's documentary, "A Poet on the Frontline: The Reportage of Ryszard Kapuscinski." The afternoon ended with a haunting sequence of Kapuscinski revisiting his hometown of Pinsk after decades, standing on the frozen river, tracing a map of the world in the snow with his boot and describing how it is possible for a boy from a landlocked town to intuit and illuminate the global realm we now inhabit. "Here's Pinsk. Here's New York. If we have enough will, if we have imagination...."
The anecdotes were by turn harrowing and hilarious.
Werner Herzog called each gray hair he got on his head a "cinski," he noted in a written tribute read by Paul Holdengraber, program director at Live from the NYPL. The reason? Kapuscinski, who was the sole foreign correspondent for the Polish press covering Africa, had been thrown in prison forty times and sentenced to death four times during a time of tribal strife. And what was his worst experience? Herzog asked. Once he was locked up in an old dungeon and drunken soldiers kept throwing poisonous snakes in his cell, Kapuscinski said. Within a week, his hair turned white.
Herzog mentioned that the two shared similar sensibilities, and had once considered doing a science fiction film together with no projections into the future--a science fiction in reverse where most of the technological abilities and our knowledge were lost.
Salman Rushdie recalled attending a performance of play based on "The Emperor," at the Royal Court. (Kapuscinski was able to get "The Emperor," his lacerating account of the last Ethiopian king, Haile Selassie, published in his native Poland in the late 1970s by putting it out in serial form, passing the censors in a titillating display of malicious obedience; to his readers there the book was about the corruption of absolute power in Poland writ large.)
The stage version of "The Emperor," Rushdie said, "led to one of the most surrealistic political demonstrations I've ever seen. Speaking as someone whose work has occasionally led to protest, I am a connoisseur of the form." Half of the protestors in Sloane Square were cigar-smoking, Savile Row suit-wearing Ethiopian monarchists (Selassie was their king); the other half, ganja-smoking dreadlocked Rastafarians (Selassie was their god).
In "The Soccer War," Kapuscinski writes of heading into the war zone in 1966 during the Nigerian civil war:"I was driving along a road where they say no white man can come back alive." How do you do it? Rushdie had once asked him. "I make myself unimportant. I make myself seem not worthy of the bullet to kill me. Kill somebody who matters..." As a result, Rushdie said, "He lived to tell the tale."
Carolin Emcke spoke of Kapuscinski the mensch, embodiment of Brecht's "good people, " a generous and thoughtful mentor to a young journalist. Breyten Breytenbach recalled his "self-effacement, courtliness, his greath warmth, his great culture--the poet, the photographer."
Kapuscinski's long-time editor, Adam Michnik of Gazeta Wyborcza, the first independent Polish daily, compared him to Joseph Conrad, and pointed out that Kapuscinski always identified with the poor and excluded of the world. "He rebelled against privilege. Writing about a postcolonial country, he also saw Poland."
Four days before he died, Michnik said, he visited Kapuscinski in the hospital. "He asked what was going on in Polish politics. I didn't want to tell him." Instead, Michnik offered two jokes from the Soviet era:
I
On Red Square,a man is passing out leaflets. He gets grabbed by the KGB. They search him and see that the leaflets are blank.
"Why were you distributing these blank leaflets?!" they demand.
"There's nothing to write," he says. "Everything's clear."
II
A man faints in the streets. When he comes to, he is in an ambulance.
"Where are you taking me?" he asks.
"To the morgue."
"But I'm still alive."
"We haven't gotten there yet."
By the time Philip Gourevitch, no slouch of a foreign correspondent/author himself, came to the podium, the vodka bottle was empty. Gourevitch talked of Kapuscinski the working reporter who covered twenty-seven revolutions and coups, going to places of great danger. "He was a wire service man. Every day he wrote wire service copy." (Kapuscinski himself once described press agency writers as "these anonymous markers of events, these terrible victims of information, working day and night in the worst of all possible conditions.") But, Gourevitch concluded, Kapuscinski was "ultimately a memoirist. He wrote about himself as a character, but, like Primo Levi, as a Chaplinesque figure, as a prose poet of great disorientation.... He was a kind of surrealist. He had an incredibly fine-tuned sense of the absurd. And a great sense of humor."
"Imagine getting 'The Emperor' through the censors in 1978 in Poland," said NBCC award winner in criticism Ren Weschler, a curator of the tribute. He reminisced about Kapuscinski's time as a fellow at the New York Institute for the Humanities (when Kapuscinski touted Herodotus, Susan Sontag reprimanded him: "It's Thucydides you should care about").
"What brilliance was that," Rushdie said during his time at the podium. "What a profoundly seeing and antic imagination we have lost."
But the stroke of brilliance in the afternoon's mix was to bring in the electrifying Polish actress Elzbieta Czyzewska to read extensively from the work, reminding us of Kapuscinski's inimitable voice, the ironic intimate storytelling voice he gave us.
Writing of the revolution in Ethiopia in "The Emperor, "All the houses were watching each other, smelling each other, sniffing each other out. This is civil war."
And of the standoff between the policeman and the man in the crowd in 1978 Teheran in "Shah of Shahs": "The man has stopped being afraid. And this is precisely the beginning of the revolution."
And in "Travels with Herodotus," due in English translation in June, this distillation of the ancient world into a line: "A bright Arcadia which every few years overflows with blood."
Yes. All we need to do is read the books--"The Emperor," "Imperium," "Shah of Shahs," "Another Day of Life," "The Soccer Wars," "Travels with Herodotus"--to know.
We have not lost Kapuscinski. | | | |
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